This is an unofficial & unaudited Rust implementation of algorithms in Dr. Thaler’s Proofs, Arguments, & ZK book. — This week we learned why multilinear extensions are useful for interactive proofs. In short, and in egregious laymen terms, multilinear extensions give us the ability to both (1) distance amplify a polynomial f , into f~, which can be evaluated by the Verifier and (2) still keep the new f~…

Part 1 of an 8-week explainer series based on Dan Boneh’s Crypto I — I hope this serves as a practical, easy-to-understand guide for crypto enthusiasts who want a stronger understanding of ciphers, encryption, number theory, and public-key encryption methods. No coding/math skills required. This week we cover: Basic symmetric ciphers: OTPs, stream ciphers Security definitions: perfect secrecy, semantic security

And how Polkadot & Substrate fits into this ecosystem — I recently gave a talk at Cogx about how blockchains scale. Where, we also discoursed how Polkadot fits into a future ecosystem where many blockchains are operating at scale. In the same vein, this post relays: A brief history of blockchain scaling solutions Polkadot & Substrate’s role in this ecosystem …

This is a somewhat illustrated guide to Zero Knowledge — I recently listened to this ZKFM podcast, which gave practical examples that clearly explained key concepts in zero knowledge. I felt inspired to transcribe them here. In cryptography, zero knowledge proofs let you convince me that you know something, or have done something, without revealing to me what your secret…

Learn Ethereum programming by making tests pass — As inspired by Ruby Koans, Solidity Koans guides you through simple, bite-sized programming exercises to learn Solidity the gentle way. The goal is to learn the Solidity language, syntax, structure, and how to create secure and gas-efficient smart contracts. …

This is a in-depth series around Zeppelin team’s smart contract security puzzles. I’ll give you the direct resources and key concepts you’ll need to solve the puzzles 100% on your own. — This levels requires you to retrieve a lost contract address to regain the remaining 0.5 ethers. It’s a common flub for Solidity developers to lose a newly created contract address. This becomes frustrating, especially if you also lose the transaction receipt and other means of retracing your steps.

This is a in-depth series around Zeppelin team’s smart contract security puzzles. I’ll give you the direct resources and key concepts you’ll need to solve the puzzles 100% on your own. — This levels requires you to unlock a registrar by abusing a poorly initiated struct. Best practices when using Structs Like in object oriented programming, you can create composite datatypes via structs. Structs can contain functions and other complex datatypes like mappings and arrays. These arrays and mappings can even contain more structs. …

This is a in-depth series around Zeppelin team’s smart contract security puzzles. I’ll give you the direct resources and key concepts you’ll need to solve the puzzles 100% on your own. — This levels requires you to combine knowledge from levels 6 and 12 to claim ownership of the contract. Refresher on delegatecall Recall from level 6: Delegate call is a special, low level function call intended to invoke functions from another, often library, contract.

This is a in-depth series around Zeppelin team’s smart contract security puzzles. We learn key Solidity concepts to solve the puzzles 100% on your own. — This levels requires you to abuse a bad ERC20 implementation and control the NaughtCoin token. What is ERC20 ERCs (Ethereum Request for Comment) are protocols that allow you to create tokens on the blockchain. ERC20, specifically, is a contract interface that defines standard ownership and transaction rules around tokens.